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A while ago, I wrote about Joe Haldeman and his debut novel The Forever War, and promised to post up our conversation. Here it is:
Andrew Liptak: What can you tell me about how you first came across science fiction? What do you first remember reading, and what made you stick with the genre?

Joe Haldeman: The first sf book I read was the Winston Juvenile ROCKET JOCKEY, by Philip St. John (pen name of Lester del Rey). My teacher caught me reading in class and took the book away – but then returned it with the admonition not to read in class, and loaned me a bunch of other YA science fiction, from her daughter's collection.

Why did I stick with the genre? There was nothing else like it. It totally captivated me, and in fact I resisted the teachers and librarians who tried to interest me in other books.

AL: I've read that you traveled quite a bit as a child - how did that impact how you viewed the world? Did this impact your writing?

JH: I suppose it must have affected my writing, because "home" was rather a plastic designation; I lived five places in my first seven years. The huge wild beauty of Alaska might have made the unearthly more accessible to me than it would have been to a child who grew up in a more prosaic place.

AL: You attended University of Maryland, where you studied physics and astronomy. Was it your interest in the subject that brought you to science fiction, or the other way around?

JH: My interest in sf and astronomy grew simultaneously, at least through my mid-teens; I didn't think of them separately until I was older.

AL: Following your graduation from college, you were drafted into the Army. What were your feelings on the Vietnam War at that point?

JH: I was against it – certainly against my being in it! I was a pacifist by natural inclination, but knew that pacifism didn't make sense to other people. (Of course the status of a draft-age pacifist is necessarily ambiguous. He may just not want to die or lose precious parts.)

AL: What was Basic like after graduating from college?

JH: I was the only college graduate in my company, and also the oldest man. I got some grudging respect from the others for both things.

None of them read science fiction, of course; most of them either couldn't read or found reading difficult. Only two other guys read for pleasure.

I must say more than that, though. These illiterate men had a very high regard for the books they couldn't read. That's not meant to be ironic.

And I learned invaluable things from them. Not being able to read is a handicap, but it doesn't make you subhuman. I was astonished (in my naiveté) at how much we had in common.

AL: Do any of them appear in your books?

JH: I took the protagonist's name Farmer in WAR YEAR from a friend who was in my platoon in Vietnam. The character in the story looks like the real person and has a similar background.

AL: What can you tell me about being shipped out to Vietnam? Your biography on your website states that you were assigned to the 4th Division. What was your job here?

JH: I was made a combat engineer (pioneer), but that doesn't have much to do with engineering as a professional or academic discipline. What we repeated to each other, wryly, was that engineers were too dumb for the infantry, so they gave us a shovel rather than a gun. (Of course we did have guns, in every variety, but I used the pick and shovel more often.)

AL: How did you experience the war?

JH: I sort of passed through it like a very realistic nightmare. Badly injured, I stayed in Vietnam, rather than returning stateside, because of a clerical error (though I was mostly out of combat those five months – only three enemy attacks).

AL: What can you tell me about your injuries?

JH: One big bullet wound in the upper thigh, a .51 caliber machine-gun round that was part of a booby trap. At the same time I absorbed about twenty large shrapnel wounds and perhaps a hundred smaller ones. Five of those impacted my testicles, and gave me as much trouble as the bullet.

AL: Your first story was 'Out of Phase', published by Galaxy Magazine in 1968. What prompted you to start writing science fiction?

JH: I was writing science fiction (in the form of long comic strips) in the fourth grade. Never stopped.

AL: Your first novel was titled War Year, about your experiences. Why write a fictional account of your experiences, rather than a memoir or history?

JH: I saw myself as a fiction writer. WAR YEAR is a slightly fictionalized memoir. It seemed like the natural approach. I wrote up an outline and a couple of sample chapters (with Ben Bova's encouragement) and sold it to the first publisher who saw it. Most of the action and descriptions are copied from the daily letters I wrote home to my wife while I was in Vietnam, combat and then hospitals.

AL: The novel you're best known for is your debut SF title, The Forever War, written at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where you got your MFA. Where did this story first appear from?

JH: It came out of a series of novelettes and novellas that were published in Analog magazine. (Actually, it was written as a coherent novel, and dissected into episodes for the magazine. Makes it an "episodic" novel, but so what?)

AL: Sorry, I think that I phrased that poorly: where did you come up with the idea for William Mandela and the plot of The Forever War?

JH: He was almost purely autobiographical. The plot of THE FOREVER WAR grew out of the novelette "Hero," which was just a science-fictional translation of my experiences in Vietnam, plus some cool aliens.

AL: How much of your experiences in Vietnam inspired The Forever War?

JH: Almost all of it. I wouldn't have even thought of writing the book if I hadn't been a soldier.

AL: A lot's been made of its connections to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and how you felt it was a work that glorified war. Do you write The Forever War as an anti-war novel?

JH: Of course it was an anti-war novel, but it wasn't an "answer" to STARSHIP TROOPERS, as some people claimed. Novels aren't conversations. I liked STARSHIP TROOPERS for what it was, a quickly written didactic novel with some great action scenes.

AL: What did Heinlein think of The Forever War?

JH: He liked it very much. When we met, he told me he had read it three times.

AL: The Forever War was written as a sort of thesis for your MFA program? I take it you passed? ;)

JH: Easily. I don't think anyone who actually finished a book did not get his or her degree, while I was at Iowa. (Not unusual for MFA's, anywhere.)

AL: What did your instructors think about the book? Was there any question about genre or encouragement to steer clear of SF?

JH: My advisor, Vance Bourjaily, liked it very much, and really, his opinion was the only one that mattered. The professor in charge of the department, Jack Leggett, and one senior professor, Stanley Elkin, detested any science fiction – or genre fiction of any description, for that matter. But Vance liked it very much (partly as a fellow combat veteran), and we became friends.

Stephen Becker, another senior professor, really liked my work, and I loved his. A few years later, I went out to Tortola to collaborate on a novel with him. We had a good time, but couldn't make the novel cohere.

AL: Once the book was written, what was the sales process like?

JH: (for WAR YEAR) Almost invisible. Holt didn't know what to do with it, so it didn't do anything. One ad, about an inch square in Publishers Weekly.

It got a full-page review in The New York Times, but Holt never followed up on that. The advertising budget was less than a thousand dollars.

Maybe this was the low point of my career: Right after WAR YEAR came out, I went to the annual publishers' convention in Washington, D.C. I had borrowed an editor's name tag, and so was anonymous when I went to the Holt, Rinehart and Winston table. They had a copy of WAR YEAR there, and I asked the salesman about it. He said he'd read it and thought it was a good book, but they weren't pushing it. "It's about Viet Nam," he said, "so nobody's gonna read it." So I slunk out radiating despair.

(For THE FOREVER WAR -- It got a small positive review in the New York Times – as a mainstream book, not science fiction. I think that helped quite a bit. In those days the NYTBR did have a science fiction column, but it was definitely treated as a poor relation, compared to things that were published in the main part of the book.)

AL: I heard that you first sold The Forever War to Terry Carr at Ace Books. What happened with that?

JH: Terry got fired and was told to take his books with him.

AL: The Forever War was also serialized in Analog (I have a copy with ‘Hero’ in it!): what was the reception like in the fan community as that was being released?

JH: What I remember is that everybody loved it. That's probably not true, but it's what I remember.

AL: What was your reaction to the number of awards that it began to win in the mid-70s?

JH: I was surprised. Now I'm less surprised.

I knew I was a good writer then, but I was surrounded by good writers who weren't making a living. Now I know that if a person is a good writer, success may come from a combination of luck and talent -- or it may not. I had enough of both, and good timing along with the luck.

Seventeen publishers turned down THE FOREVER WAR, usually with the explanation given above – good book but nobody will touch it. The eighteenth, Tom Dunne at St. Martin's Press, decided to take a chance. That made all the difference.

AL: Nobody would publish the novel because it was about Vietnam?

JH: Right. Vietnam novels were un-sellable.

AL: The book has consistently been named as one of the best SF novels out there since it’s publication: do you think that it’s become more relevant since the US has been engaged in the Middle East?

JH: Maybe so, but that doesn't have anything to do with my intentions – except that one war is much like another, from the ground-pounder's point of view.

AL: What has the reaction been like from the veteran / soldier community?

JH: Soldiers and veterans have been very positive about the book, though I suspect that a large part of that is people not saying anything if they didn't like it. Criticizing a disabled veteran, after all.

When I was in High School, I devoured Ender's Game and Starship Troopers, but it wasn't until I'd left graduate school that someone forced me to read The Forever War. When I did, I sort of missed the point of the book, and going back to it recently with this research, I'm finding that it's a book that's growing for me each time I read it. It's certainly one of the best SF novels that I've ever read.

I've interviewed Joe several times already, and we included him in War Stories, with his story Graves leading off the TOC. Going back and looking at how his book was written has been something I've wanted to do for a while now, and after writing up this column, I have to say, I need to give the book another read to fully appreciate it, I think.

Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, Brian Aldiss. Aldiss has some interesting points to make here about TFW and its placement in genre literature.

Gateways to Forever: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1970 to 1980, Mike Ashley. Ashley notes where Haldeman began writing and where he was able to first publish his stories.

Science Fiction Writers Second Edition, Richard Bleiler. Blieler has a good biographical sketch of Haldeman in this edition.

The Forever War, Joe Haldeman. Haldeman himself has some things to say about his own book. My 1991 edition has a good author forward.

Sci-Fi Chronicles: A Visual History of the Galaxy's Greatest Science Fiction, Guy Haley. This recently released book isn't terribly academic, but it has a page devoted to Haldeman (written by Damien Walter). Overall, it's a really neat, (dense) book with a TON of material. Good for flipping through.

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Vol. 2- The Man Who Learned Better, 1948-1988, William H. Patterson Jr. Patterson talks about Heinlein's interactions with Haldeman in 1975 here.

Fights of Fancy: Armed Conflict in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by George Slusser and Eric Rabkin. There's a fantastic essay from Haldeman called Vietnam and other Alien Worlds, which is well worth reading. (Here's a good source online.

This was a great year for reading. A lot of excellent fiction was released, and I felt like I got a lot of good out of my year from the books that I picked up. Here's what I read.

1- A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, Neil Sheehan (1-14)
This was a fantastic history on the Cold War, one that I wish I'd come across while I was working on my project. I've revisited it a couple of times since the start of the year for other projects.

2 - The Forever War, Joe Halderman (1-28)
This was a book that had come highly recommended for years, and I really enjoyed how it was more about people than guns and brawn.

3 - The Monuments Men, Robert Edsel (2-8)
During the Second World War, a team of specialists were dispatched around Europe to save art from the effects of war, the focus of this book. It's a little uneven, but tells an astonishing story.

4 - We, John Dickinson (2-19)
This was a crappy book. Amateurish and poorly written.

5 - Coraline, Neil Gaiman (2-24)
I watched the movie around the same time, and I've long like Gaiman's works. This was an excellent YA novel.

6 - Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, John Scalzi (3-4)
Scalzi's Whatever blog is always an entertaining read, and this collection takes some of the better entries into a book of short essays. Thought-provoking, interesting and well worth reading.

7 - Shadowline, Glenn Cook (3-6)
With all of my complaints about military science fiction not being all that accurate or conceived of, Shadowline is one of the few books that have made me eat my words - there's some well conceived ideas here, and this reprint from Night Shade Books was a fun read.

8 - The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jeminsin (3-19)
N.K. Jemisin's first novel came with a lot of buzz, and I really enjoyed reading it from start to finish. It's a very different blend of fantasy than I've ever read.

9 - Spellwright, Blake Charlton (3-29)
Spellwright was probably one of my favorite reads of the year - it was fast, entertaining and thoughtful - a good fantasy debut, and I'm already eager for the sequel.

10 - The Gaslight Dogs, Karin Lowachee (4-21).
Karin Lowachee's Warchild was a favorite book from my high school years, and I was delighted to see her back after a long absence. This steampunk novel is an unconventional one, and a good example for the rest of the genre to follow.

11 - The Mirrored Heavens, David J. Williams (5-17)
David J. Williams contacted me after I wrote an article on military science fiction, and I went through his first book with vigor - it's a fast-paced, interesting take on military SF and a bit of Cyberpunk.

12 - Third Class Superhero, Charles Yu (5-28)
Charles Yu distinguished himself as a talented writer with his short fiction, and his recently released collection shows off some great stories.

13 - Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi (6-1)
Bacigalupi goes to Young Adult fiction with Ship Breaker, an excellent read set in a post-oil world. He gets a lot of things right with this: the surroundings and trappings of the world aren't always important, but the characters and their struggles are timeless.

14 - Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (6-8)
This much-hyped book was one that I avoided for a while, but I blew through it after I picked it up. It's a fun, exciting read in the quintessential steampunk world that Priest has put together. I love this alternate Seattle.

15 - To A God Unknown, John Steinbeck (7-15)
Steinbeck's book is a dense one that took me a while to read through while I was reading several books at one. It's an interesting take on biblical themes and on faith itself.

16 - American Gods, Neil Gaiman (7-25)
This was a book that was a pick for the 1b1t movement on twitter (something I hope returns), and I was happy for the excuse to re-read this fantastic novel. It's one of my favorite books of all time, and this time around, it was fantastic to have that reaffirmed.

17 - The Burning Skies, David J Williams (7-25)
The followup to the Mirrored Heavens, this book took me a while to get through because it was dense and intense. A decent read, but it proved to be a bit of a chore to get through.

18 - How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu (7-30)
This was probably one of the best science fiction books that I've read in a long time. It's brilliant, well written, interesting and part of the story itself. It's an outstanding take on time travel as well.

19 - River Of Gods, Ian McDonald (9-2)
I've long heard of Ian McDonald, but I hadn't picked up any of his stories before now. His take on a future India is a fantastic one, and can't wait for more of his stories. River of Gods broke the mold when it comes to western science fiction: the future will be for everyone.

20 - Clementine, Cherie Priest (9-3)
This short novella was a bit too compact for the story that it contained, but it demonstrated that The Clockwork Century is something that can easily extend beyond Boneshaker.

21 - Pattern Recognition (9-11)
William Gibson's book from a couple of years ago, taking science fiction to the present day in this thriller. It's a fun read, and I've already got the sequels waiting for me.

22 - New Model Army, Adam Roberts (9-22)
This military science fiction book had an interesting premise: what happens when crowdsourcing and wikiculture comes to warfare. The book is a little blunt at points, but it's more thought provoking than I thought it would be.

23 - Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman (9-26)
An excellent anthology of short stories from all over the speculative fiction genre. There's some real gems in there.

24 - Andvari's Ring, Arthur Peterson (9-26)
A translation of norse epic poetry from the early 1900s, this book looks and feels like a book should, and is one of those bookstore discoveries that I love. This was a fun book that has roots for a number of other stories in it.

25 - The City and The City, China Miéville (9-30)
One of my absolute favorite stories of the year came with this book, my first introduction to Mieville. This murder mystery set against a fantastic background has some great implications that go with the story.

26 - Pump Six and Other Stories, Paolo Bacigaulupi (10-22)
A paperback version of Bacigalupi's stories was released towards the end of the year, and I have to say, it's one of the more disturbing reads of the year, but also one of the most excellent.

27 - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving (10-31)
I did a little reading on Washington Irving and found an e-book of this while I was going through a bit of a fascination on the gothic / horror genre. This book does it well. Hopefully, I'll be able to do a bit more research on the author and his fiction this year.

28 - The Walking Dead, Robert Kirkman (11-8)
The television show was an interesting one, and I finally was able to catch up on the comic that started it. They're very close to start, but that changes after a couple of episodes. Some of the characters were spot on.

29 - Baltimore, or,The Steadfast Tin Soldier, Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola. (11-8)
This was a fun read: Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden both have some great storytelling abilities when it comes to horror fiction, and their take on vampires is an excellent one.

30 - Dreadnought, Cherie Priest (11-10)
Cherie Priest had a really good thing with Boneshaker, but Dreadnought was a bit of a disappointment. It didn't have the same flair or feeling that the first book did, but it did do some things that I'd wanted to see in Boneshaker. It's an interesting series, and I'll be interested to see what happens next.

31 - Lost States, Michael Trinklein (11-13)
This was a fun book that I came across in a local store on states that didn't make it. It's a fun, quick read with a number of fun stories.

32 - The Jedi Path, Daniel Wallace (11-14)
While I thought this book wasn't worth the $100 for all the frills and packaging, this is a really cool read for Star Wars fans, going into some of the history and methods of the Jedi Order.

33 - Horns, Joe Hill (11-22)
This was the other absolutely fantastic book that I read this year (reading it as an ebook and then from the regular book) from localish author Joe Hill. The story of a man who sprouts horns and a small, emotional story about his life. It's an astonishing read, and one that will hopefully be up for a couple of awards.

34 - Doom Came to Gotham, Mike Mignola (11-24)
This was a fun, alternate take on the Batman stories in a steampunk world. Batman + Mignola's art = awesome.

35 - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J.K. Rowling (11-28)
36 - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J.K. Rowling (11-29)
37 - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling (12-1)
38 - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (12-3)
39 - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling (12-12)
40 - Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling (12-15)
41 - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, J.K. Rowling (12-18)
I'm not going to talk about each Potter novel in turn, but as a single, continuous story, Rowling has put together a hell of a story here. Outstanding characters and storylines, and the works as a whole are greater than the sum of their parts.

42 - The Magicians, Lev Grossman (12-27)

The logical book to read after the Harry Potter series was Lev Grossman's novel that can be described as an anti-Harry Potter. It's a fun novel the second time through, and good preparation for his followup this year.

43 - Brave New Worlds, John Joseph Adams (12-31)

The review for this book is coming shortly, but I have to say, it's one of the best anthologies that I've ever read.

On Thursday, io9 published a piece by me entitled Your Military Science Fiction Isn't Military Science Fiction, which garnered a number of e-mails, praise, rejection and a lot of conversation about the thesis that I posed: Military Science Fiction is essentially Soldier Science Fiction, in a way that a Stephen Ambrose book isn't really Military History. The elements are there, but when it comes down to it, there's a lot of military science fiction out there that really looks to things other than warfare. Starship Troopers is about politics, the Forever War is about how societies change with time, and so forth.

While the premise sounds ridiculous on the first glance (It's got soldiers, of course it's about the military), the intentions behind this idea go a bit further. While stories incorporate the military within their plots and environments, there's very few military science fiction (or speculative fiction or space opera, if you wish) stories that really makes sense within their finer details, such as tactical and technological ones, to larger elements of the worlds, such as the military thought and theory that goes behind the stories. In a number of cases, the stories look back on wars previously fought, such as the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam and so forth.

My argument stems from both issues. Military experiences are largely evolutionary, and the experiences that are borne out of one war are often applied to another, but not universally. Not only does theory change with the new information, the situation on the ground also changes. From my own readings of the straight-up military science fiction genre, there's very few books that get this right - more often than not, these books take the visible aspects of recent wars or notable ones, and applies them to space. While the translation isn't exact when it moves to science fiction novels, it's a fairly close approximation, with smaller changes cropping up where needed.

One major tendency is that technology itself isn't a silver bullet when it comes to military theory and practical combat operations. Amongst military historians, there is a 'Western' style of warfare, of which, there is a technological element, but one that contributes. Technology alone is rarely an element that dictates the successes of a mission, but its usage and integration into regular military formations, is. The lines here blur when it comes to far more modern technology, and it can be argued that the Cold War was entirely dictated by technological advances, and that major elements of the Gulf and Iraq Wars were likewise won because of superior technology - this is not the case. Within military science fiction, the technological aspect often takes precedent, whether it's superior bombs, combat suits, guns or ships, but oftentimes, the surrounding culture and background history isn't as well thought-out as to the implementation of such advances, which then pairs superior technology, but in situations and tactics that are largely borne out of older wars.

This line of thinking isn't necessarily a condemnation of these older books, and they're certainly not held to any sort of predictive level - their view and existence is about other issues, decidedly not about where the future of the military will lie. However, they do act as a good sort of test case and examples of what can be done to do such a novel: the worlds behind these conflicts needs to be sought out and thought out. Readings of military theorists, such as Clausewitz and others make for good starting points, and within that context, an author can put together a background history that provides an environment for military operations that makes far more sense. There's no need for a futuristic treatise on military thought and theory (On War was exceedingly dull - a sci-fi version of it would be only just a little less so), but within the proper context, there could be some fantastic books out there.

To be fair, there are a number of books out there that do have a number of elements that work extremely well - Dune, by Frank Herbert, provides such a look, but others, such as Nancy Kress's Probability Trilogy, Charles Stross's Singularity Sky/Iron Sunrise duo, Karen Traviss's Wess'Har Wars, as well as a couple of others, which represent a certain amount of good thinking and conceptualization behind the worlds in which they exist, and tend to fall in more of the military science fiction realm, rather than the soldier science fiction side of the house.

This isn't to say that the works out there are bad. I greatly enjoyed John Scalzi's Old Man's War, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Joe Halderman's The Forever War. They're enjoyable, entertaining, and provide a good line of thinking behind their respective stories, but in a lot of ways, they represent a very different line of thinking than the military side of the house.

Amongst one of the many books that has come highly recommended to me, especially from my fellow graduate students, was Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. Published in 1974, Haldeman's book is an interesting one, tying together a stiff criticism for the Vietnam War, in which he was a participant and recipient of the Army's Purple Heart, a look at the future of humanity and a romp through futuristic military battlefields. The book is scattered, to say the least, through these three larger themes, and while the book as a whole is a pretty strong one, reading it brought up some larger issues that I have with the whole of the military science fiction subgenre.

Branching off from the 1980s, humanity has taken to the stars fairly early in its history, travelling the galaxy via collapstars, which fires off a ship around the galaxy. During the course of humanity's exploration, they come into contact with a race of aliens known as the Taurans, and inevitably, war breaks out. The story's protagonist, William Mandella, is conscripted into the military, where he's trained and sent off to the distant front lines to fight, eventually becoming part of the first engagement against the Taurans. With that battle completed, he is shipped home, along with his lover, Marygay Potter, to an Earth that they hardly recognize. After a short period of time, they leave again, rejoin the military and rejoin the fight. Over the next several hundred years (only a couple for them, subjectively), they are retrained, and eventually separated, before one last battle brings Mandella back home, where he is eventually reunited with Marygay.

The book is ultimately lackluster as a military science fiction novel: the action scenes are nothing new, and anyone reading Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers or John Scalzi's Old Man's War will recognize the basics when it comes to this sort of novel - there are powered suits, the requisite training portion and rise of the protagonist, not to mention the action. Taken at face value, it's a bit of a miss for me. The biggest saving grace is Haldeman's conceptualization of space warfare, where tactics take days, weeks, even months to carry out, over hundreds of millions of kilometers. This gives the book a bit of a realistic edge that does make it stand apart from other military Science Fiction novels, something that I greatly appreciated.

However, where the book succeeds the most is in Haldeman's look to the future. As Mandela lives out his life through the military actions that he takes, long stretches of his life are relatively slowed down while travelling through space, allowing for jumps in time as he comes back into contact with Earth and sees just how society has changed over time. Upon his first return, humanity has united on Earth, under a largely repressive, Children of Men style world where human civilization has faced enormous hardship under the interstellar war. Leaving the world as it has changed too much for his liking, William and Marygay return to space, to find several major changes as they continue to jump around space. Eventually, the world as they know it has changed completely - humanity has gone from a recognizable society to one where homosexuality is the norm (as a form of population control) to a world where humanity has essentially merged into one asexual entity, with each generation cloned from the last. Elements of this remind me heavily of another book that I've been recently reading, Olaf Stapledon's The First and Last Men, published in the 1930s, and dealing with much the same thing: looking at how humanity as a species and culture will change in the future. Mandela's vantage point in the military is an interesting story element that allows Haldeman to not only tell an interesting story, but present a compelling future for humanity. Another book that I read last year, George Friedman's The Next 100 Years, noted that society and cultural norms can change vastly over even the period of just one hundred years, and to an extent, that lends Haldeman's and Stapleton's ideas some reality: what will happen to humanity over the next thousand years, with technological and societal advances altering what is normal? It is here that The Forever War is especially interesting.

Another major element of The Forever War is Haldeman's pointed look at the Vietnam War, no doubt inspired by his own experiences with the US Army. The book is considered a reaction to Starship Troopers, in that it takes a largely anti-military stance throughout most of the book. Mandella is a reluctant soldier, at best, often delegating his responsibilities away to subordinates and avoiding killing when he can help it. But throughout the book, there are examples of Vietnam, as humanity faces an enemy that is largely unknown, never knowing exactly what they are fighting for. More so, it is alluded to in the book that the war was fought simply because it was desired, something that was the main focus of a documentary, Why We Fight, that looked to that central theme in regards to American foreign policy. However, the core focus of this book isn't the Vietnam War itself, but the soldiers who fight there. Soldiers returning from Vietnam found themselves back home in a strange place, not as heroes of the war, but as murderers and criminals, something horribly unjust, considering that many were conscripted. This is a prime example of how science fiction should function: acting as allegory for current events, pulled out of context. Mandella returns home after hundreds and hundreds of years away from Earth; vast changes occurred while he was away.

The Vietnam comparison, however, is something that bothers me, and helps to underscore a larger issue that I have with military science fiction as a whole, something that I brought up with my review for Old Man's War: while there is a lot of discussion about the nature of war, there's very little discussion towards the institution of warfare. Tactics are almost always something out of the Second World War, with plenty of hand to hand combat scenes and all that, but there is very little on the overall impact of warfare. Sometimes, it's on the soldiers, other times, on society, but there's very little to bridge the gap. The Forever War does this in part.

Part of my issue comes from my training as a historian, and particularly, in military history. Amongst all of the theorists out there, a number of historians have come up with a number of theories on how warfare works - Clausewitz, Jomini, among others, who have both conflicting and interesting views on the nature of war. I particularly like Clausewitz's analogy that warfare is simply a duel on a larger scale, and that war is an extension of foreign policy. It makes little sense to me that humanity would simply go to war against an alien race, something fairly common in science fiction. Humanity seems to drop everything and take to the stars with lasers and rockets, but the goals of warfare are never clearly stated? Is it, as Clausewitz suggests, an effort to completely bend an enemy to one's will, something incredibly difficult when attacking someone profoundly alien and unknown to humanity, or is it something deeper, such as perceived competition for living space, ensuring that humanity will have space to grow? To date, I've never found a good military science fiction book that's really covered that territory, and at times, the genre makes me want to throw things, simply because warfare doesn't work like that.

Similarly, while powered robotic suits are very cool, the other problem that I have is tactical. Robotic powered armor laden down with guns simply doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, especially when the authors talk much about dropping soldiers onto the planet from orbit in a glorified Omaha Beach scenario, where these soldiers are not only placed into hostile territory, but usually without support: it reminds me very much of airborne doctrine during the Second World War, where highly mobile forces were used to secure areas and wait for heavier things, such as artillery and armor to arrive. It's a good concept, to be sure, but it's deeply flawed in that these soldiers are usually out matched by the occupying force. Science Fiction takes many similar themes, but fails to follow up these sort of tactical options in any way that makes sense. Thus far, the best thing that I've seen was here, The Physics of Space Battles, which talks much about orbits and how that aspect would work, on a tactical level. Haldeman gets some points for interesting scenes and more science to the battles than most, but still misses part of the mark.

Part of that reason might be that The Forever War isn't really a military science fiction book, despite some of the content. In that instance, the book works wonderfully, hitting all of the marks of a fantastic science fiction novel. Still, I enjoy a good romp with powered armor and shooting, so it works fairly well when it comes to that, but not as much as I'd like.